Great news this week. Microsoft has finally released Visual Studio 2008. I've been looking forward to this since Teched in August.

The worst bit of about the news is the download experience. The trial versions of the products can be had from the MSDN site. I ran the download yesterday after lunch and this morning when I checked the progress it said something about "a persistent network connectivity error preventing download completion". At this point it had download about 20% (only!) of about 4GB. After clicking various dialog boxes, the download disappeared and I was back to square zero!

This post on Rachard's Braindump (http://richardsbraindump.blogspot.com/2007/11/problems-with-new-msdn-download-manager.html) sums up my experience. Pretty shite!

Now I am just going to wait for the MSDN disks in January, unless Microsoft lets us use our own download managers.